Digital Faith

A Mormon View of Paul

Despite his central role in the New Testament — hero of Acts, apostle to the Gentiles, author of Romans, Galatians, and other letters — Paul presents a number of questions and problems for any serious student or scholar of the New Testament. What is the LDS view of Paul? Is there even an LDS view of Paul? Peter, James, and John appear prominently in LDS scripture and history, but Paul played no apparent role in the Restoration. Why not?

Bible and Authority

I've been renting N. T. Wright's The Last Word: Beyond the Bible Wars to a New Understanding of the Authority of Scripture (HarperCollins, 2005) from my local library for the last few days. [It starts out as borrowing, but when the book starts collecting fines but you choose to keep it and finish it anyway, then it's a rental.] Wright's discussion is a lot more interesting in light of a post I did last week, "Bible, Church, and Mystic: for those in cells 4 and 5 (Bible-type churches that ascribe transcendent or rational authority to the Bible), explaining how texts actually confer authority is a critical discussion.

Apocrypha

As the LDS curriculum shifts from the Old Testament to the New Testament, there's a gap of five centuries between the post-Exile situation depicted in Ezra and Nehemiah and the New Testament writings of the first century. The Bible doesn't do much to fill that gap — at least the LDS Bible and others that omit the Apocrypha. I'm going to summarize the entry "Apocrypha" in the Oxford Dictionary of the Bible, then add a few comments about the LDS view of the Apocrypha and other non-canonical writings, including D&C 91.

Mormonism in American Grace

This is the second post on the book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (see first post). The broad theme of the book is positive: despite high diversity and high religiosity, Americans manage to get along and generally avoid religious strife. But the book also shows that for more and more Americans, religion is less and less relevant. Politics, it seems, is what really animates and divides us. In this post I'll discuss what the book says about Mormonism in particular, most of that discussion coming in the religion and politics section of the book.

Living in the Second Religious Aftershock

I am reading my way through the hot new book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (Simon & Schuster, 2010). [Note: T&S is running a 12 Questions feature with David E. Campbell, one of the authors of the book.] In the first few chapters, the authors survey how religion in America has changed over the last fifty years, starting with the cultural earthquake of the Sixties, followed by two aftershocks: a conservative retrenchment that peaked in the eighties and then a renewed move away from organized religion that is presently in the ascendant. We're living in the second aftershock.

Is Evolution a Secular Religion?

This is the third and final post commenting on philosopher Michael Ruse's The Evolution-Creation Struggle (see Part 1 and Part 2). Ruse thinks evolutionism (his term for the popular side of evolution) is something of a secular religion. Why?

Christian Responses to Evolution

This is the second post commenting on Michael Ruse's The Evolution-Creation Struggle (see Part 1). Christian responses to evolution come in three flavors: those that reject it as inconsistent with Christian beliefs; those that accept it and find evolution compatible with Christian belief; and those that minimize the interaction of belief and evolution by placing scientific knowledge and religious belief in two different domains.

The Truth About Evolution

I am working my way through The Evolution-Creation Struggle, by Michael Ruse, a philosopher at Florida State. That's important: he's not a biologist for whom science can do no wrong and religion can do nothing right, he's a philosopher interested in a broader set of questions about the protracted debate between science and religion. I'll cover topics from the first half of the book in this post.

The first point is that evolution didn't start with Darwin. It was in the air ever since the Enlightenment produced a a general belief in the possibility of human progress. Christians could be as progressive as more secular thinkers. The idea that human effort could and should make the world a better place was a central tenet of postmillennialism and of the social gospel of the late 19th century.

Carl Sagan on God and Mormonism, Part 2

[Part 1] Sagan has a paragraph on Mormonism in the chapter entitled "Extraterrestrial Folklore: Implications for the Evolution of Religion," offered as one of several examples of the wacky things religious people believe. Might as well just throw it out there.

The Technology of Scripture

The following is the text of a Sacrament Meeting talk Dave presented on October 24, 2010. The title, subtitles, links, and images have been added.

The theme for this month is the scriptures, and the Bishop asked me to address to address this topic for a few minutes. I'm going to talk about reading the scriptures, learning the scriptures, and practicing the scriptures.